Frank: The Voice (11 page)

But she loved him. And he loved her. It was the God’s honest truth. She knew him to the bottom of his soul, and loved him for it and in spite of it. What’s more, she knew he contained that strangest of all quantities, there among the frame row houses and brownstone tenements of blue-collar, bill-paying Hudson County: greatness. And he loved that she knew it, and he loved that she loved him, and he loved her goodness, her wisdom, and her sweet kisses.

It was just that he needed so much more …

It was time to put a cap on things. There were more Tonis out there. Dolly came up with a 1930s solution: against the Barbatos’ grave misgivings, Frank and Nancy would be married. It happened just a little over a month after his second arrest—Saturday, February 4, 1939, at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. A small wedding, in the Barbatos’ territory; few Hobokenites in attendance. The bride’s white dress was as true as the tears that flowed from her eyes as her father, guardedly happy, walked her down the aisle: she did love Frank Sinatra, but now she was joined to him forever, with all that entailed.

Three weeks later, Dolly was arrested once more, for performing another abortion. This too made the papers. The Sinatras were famous all over Hudson County.

So the boy left his mother (sort of: he was commanded to visit Garden Street at least once a week—alone, if possible) and settled, uneasily, into married life, in a $42-a-month, third-floor walk-up on Garfield
Avenue in Jersey City. As cozy as the little apartment was, the newlyweds didn’t see much of each other. Weekdays, Nancy worked as a $25-a-week secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth, rising early to the sight of her skinny young husband still snoring, exhausted from his labors at the Cabin. The club—on-site arrests notwithstanding—had given him a raise to $25 a week. He often spent more than that on clothes. His practical young wife fretted about his predilection for budget-busting $35 Woodside suits. She skimped on her own clothing, made him silk bow ties so he wouldn’t have to spend the money. His wardrobe took up what little closet space they had, and then some.

She coped. She wanted stability, and a family; she still worried about his mercurial nature. As far as other women were concerned, she knew it was not a question of if, but—Italian men being Italian men—when and how. (Mike Barbato, the tough paterfamilias, the paragon of respectability, was no exception in this regard.) But Nancy loved Frank desperately. He was infinitely sensitive; he could be so sweet and funny. And she knew he loved her. Then the slightest thing—there was no predicting—could set him off. And she had backbone: she would stand up to him. They had some terrible blowouts (the neighbors below banged on their ceiling). Then they made up. That was nice.

She wanted children. What else was marriage for? He was reluctant at first: they couldn’t afford them yet. She did everything she could to hold him—cooked him spaghetti just the way he liked it, baked him lemon-meringue pies. He loved her meals, and he loved her, but he was elusive. He had important places to go, people to see. He would rise in the afternoon and gather up his Hoboken pal Nick Sevano before getting on the ferry to Manhattan and making the rounds of radio stations and music publishers. Sanicola and Van Heusen would often join him for the evening, along with a new friend, a fast-talking, wisecracking, breathtakingly talented little lyricist named Sammy Cahn. Nobody else in the crew was married. Why were the chicks always drawn to the one that was?

He felt stalled that spring, a fly trapped in amber. He had married
in haste; he wasn’t cut out for it. He loved her so much, but he wasn’t cut out for it. Much of the time—he hated himself for thinking it—Nancy was a millstone around his neck. He wasn’t getting any younger, and his career wasn’t going anywhere. The radio stations still weren’t paying, and nerves caused him to blow two important occasions: Once when he was trying out for a band run by a new leader, a rich kid from Detroit named Bob Chester, Tommy Dorsey stopped by. Tommy fucking
Dorsey
. Sinatra got so flustered at the sight of that cold Irish puss (he looked like a goddamn emperor or something) that he forgot the lyrics of the song he was singing and froze—literally opened his mouth and nothing came out.

And the same damn thing happened again one night at the Cabin: almost fifty years later, the horror of it would still live with him. “
On a Sunday evening during the summer months, people would come back from the countryside, and stop and have a little nip before they went over the bridge to go back into New York,” Sinatra recalled, at Yale Law School in 1986.

But with Sinatra, ambition trumped shame every time. And twenty years later, during the making of
High Society
, Porter would recall the night, and smile.

One afternoon that winter, Frankie stopped by the Sicilian Club in Bayonne and found Frank Mane, an alto sax player he knew from WAAT, rehearsing some songs with a ten-piece pickup band. When he asked Mane what he was practicing for, the sax player told him he was trying out for a spot with a Los Angeles outfit, Clyde Lucas and His California Dons. He was going over to Manhattan to make an audition record.

“
Cheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?” Frankie asked.

Mane shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

And so on March 18, all atingle, Frankie set foot for the first time in a recording studio—Harry Smith’s, 2 West Forty-sixth Street, a large office tower today. It was a Saturday afternoon: the city was quiet; studio time was cheap. After Mane and his band cut a couple of instrumentals, the musicians took out the sheet music to something called “Our Love”—corny lyrics grafted onto Tchaikovsky’s theme for
Romeo and Juliet
. Then, with a nod from the guy in the glass booth, the band hit the first notes and Frankie began to sing. He couldn’t help grinning at the freedom and ease, the
rightness
of it: he was making a record!

A little while later, he was able to listen to a 78-rpm demo platter with his very own voice on it. It was a respectable-enough debut: the
sound was a little scratchy, the band’s tempo plodding, but Frankie had sung on key and hit all the high notes. To him it was a miracle: he would have listened to the disc over and over again if Frank Mane had let him, so entranced was he at the sound of his own voice.

It wasn’t just narcissism. His ear, after all, was part of his genius. He was literally amazed at himself—the voice
worked
. Technically speaking, there were much better instruments out there: the Eberle brothers, Bob (who spelled it “Eberly”) and Ray; Dick Haymes—all, at that point, could sing circles around him. They had bigger, richer baritones; they sounded like men. He still sounded like a boy.

But this was what worked for him—he didn’t sound like anyone else. He
was
a boy, and he was vulnerable (and would remain so, as long as Dolly was alive), and he could carry a tune, in both senses of
both words. He made good and goddamn sure that he understood the words to every song he sang, made sure (like Mabel, like Billie) that his audiences knew he was telling a story. And his audiences (and especially the women in them) wanted to hear him telling it.

The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. A man with full knowledge of his own importance.
(photo credit 5.2)

A woman happened to hear him on the radio one night that spring—the WNEW wire from the Rustic Cabin, the
Dance Parade
. Her name was Louise Tobin, and she was a band singer herself—young, black haired, gorgeous, and newly married to a freshly minted young bandleader, a tall, rail-thin, hatchet-headed Texas trumpeter named Harry James. Tobin and James were in their room at the Lincoln Hotel, at Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street; Tobin was preparing to catch a late train for a gig in Boston; James was lying on the bed, resting up after his appearance at the Paramount.

Tobin was standing at the mirror, watching herself putting in an earring, wearing that abstracted look women get, holding the earring post in her mouth, when she heard this kid singing “Night and Day” through the Philco’s cheesy speaker. (This time he knew the words.) The voice stopped her. The kid had something. It wasn’t the most stupendous voice she had ever heard—the earring post didn’t fall from her lips—but he sounded awfully self-assured for however the hell old he was.

“So,” Tobin recalled many years later, “I woke Harry and said, ‘Honey, you might want to hear this kid on the radio.’ ”